The response to al-Qaida and the 'War on Terry'

Monday 5 October 2009 18.49 EDT
First published on Monday 5 October 2009 18.49 EDT

Stephen Lander, the former head of the Security Service, MI5, said the agency only began worrying about the threat to Britain from Islamist terrorism after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

He was speaking at the launch of MI5's official history – an idea he promoted to mark its centenary – which accuses MI5 of being too slow to recognise the threat posed by al-Qaida and its supporters.

The book was written by Christopher Andrew, the Cambridge historian given exclusive access to MI5's archive of 400,000 files. Though the book was vetted, Andrew was free to make his own judgments.

The book says the then director-general, Dame Stella Rimington, had never heard of al-Qaida until it "cropped up" at CIA talks at the White House in March 1996.

For more than a year after 9/11, MI5 thought the main Islamist threat to Britain would come from abroad, and not the "homegrown terrorists" who carried out the 7 July 2005 bombings, Andrew said.

Asked yesterday about the criticism, Lander said Andrew was "reading the 9/11 story backwards". "Only after the invasion of Iraq we started worrying about indigenous [threats]", he added.

Lander was reflecting widespread opposition within MI5 to the invasion of Iraq and George Bush's rhetoric on the "war on terror". Andrew revealed that the phrase was lampooned in an MI5 revue, entitled The War on Terry (WOT).

Lady Manningham-Buller, Lander's successor, said in July she had warned ministers and officials that an invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat. Amid Anglo-US preparations to invade Iraq, she asked: "Why now?" She added: "I said it as explicitly as I could. I said something like, 'The threat to us would increase because of Iraq.'"